


She Is The Doctor

by kickpuncher



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Roleswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-03
Updated: 2012-10-03
Packaged: 2017-11-15 13:39:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/527899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kickpuncher/pseuds/kickpuncher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brief AU where Amy Pond is the Doctor, lonely red-haired space adventurer extraordinaire, and the Doctor is John Smith, ordinary twenty-first century Earth human.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Is The Doctor

My name is John Smith, and I’m ordinary. Not the right kind of ordinary for other people to like me, mostly, but I mean, pretty ordinary. I wear a bowtie and tweed, yeah, but that’s just a matter of taste, and I’m still a human being and I still have an office job. Nine to five, five days a week. I take holidays in August and December. Keep a stress ball that looks like the Earth on my desk to combat repetitive strain disorder, because I never used to bother and my fingers ached like anything. I read books and always watch ‘The Sky At Night’. I have a takeaway once a week, and then I have another takeaway or three later on in the week but those don’t count because they’re spontaneous, and I think about getting a dog and what I’d call the dog and what the landlord would have to say about my getting the dog called High Prince Wonderwoof, and I hoover my flat sometimes, probably not often enough... and that’s my life.

It’s all right. I get on.

Or that’s what I would have told you three months ago.

I’m still ordinary. I still wear the bowtie and tweed, even if I get my hair vigorously ruffled in punishment for it. But now I’m travelling with someone extraordinary, and the extraordinariness feels like it might be rubbing off on me.

She’s called the Doctor. She has this amazing red hair, and she wears long scarves and boots with short skirts, and she’s amazing. I could tell you all about what she looked like and it wouldn’t matter because she’s amazing in a different way, she’s just the most amazing person in the entire universe. It shines out of her from a well deep inside. She could have a face like a slapped arse and she’d still be amazing. She’s like an explosion in a bottle and a thousand diamonds trickling down from the sky. She’s like a sports car screaming across the desert, whipping up huge clouds of sand in her wake. She’s incredible. She’s going to be everywhere and see everything, and she said she wanted to take me with her. So I went. Wouldn’t you?

You should see her. See her facing down the bad guys. Because there a lot of bad guys, blimey, there are a lot of bad guys! When I realised how many there are, realised that pettiness and cruelty aren’t unique to the human condition, I thought I was going to break down and cry at how the universe is made. But she materialises and takes two strides into the room and they scatter into the stars like a flock of pigeons, running scared – and if they don’t then they end up with their plans smashed, their resolve throttled. The people they were going to hurt throw a party, or if they never knew the danger then we leave quietly and let them carry on, happily ignorant. She’s a hero, and sometimes I feel like I’m a hero too, when I’m around her. Sometimes she looks at me like I am one, and I nearly believe it.

Once I asked her why she sounded Scottish, and she said lots of places have a Scotland, and grinned triumphantly at a joke I didn’t get.

More than once I saw her face when she thought I couldn’t, and she looked so sad. She looked like the world had stopped turning for her, like the stars had gone out, like half her soul had been stripped away. I asked her what was wrong, and she smiled at me, all tiredness and drained warmth, and patted me vaguely on the face and said it was ancient history, and whizzed us off to somewhere new.

I think she had a daughter, once, and somebody she was in love with. They’re not around anymore. Not anywhere I’ve ever seen. I keep meaning to ask what happened, but I don’t know if I should – I don’t know if I’d be opening up wounds I couldn’t close again. She’s got this boundless energy, but she sucks everything up, every bad thing, and holds onto them. You can see her do it, if you watch. And if I tried to get her to show me one little thing, prise open her hand and see what she was holding so close to her chest, I don’t know how much I’d see. It might shatter everything. So I don’t ask. I make cups of tea and I put on bow ties that are increasingly outrageous, I’ve even got some spinning ones somewhere in case of emergency, and I let her jump us erratically from place to place because that seems to help her keep her mind off things.

On the better days she calls me ‘her idiot’ and tweaks my nose, and I call her ‘moonface spacewoman’ and flick her scarf. She makes a face at my bowties and I scoff at her driving. She drives her spaceship like it’s a tin can in a washing machine. I ask her if anyone’s ever been sick in the time vortex and she sternly replies that they’d eaten too many jelly sweets beforehand and it had nothing to do with her.

We kissed once. We were at a fancy party trying to distract attention from our accomplice of the day who’d just broken clumsily in through a window, and her body temperature is lower than a human’s so it was strange and cool, and it was also terrible and awkward because we were both straining at the corners of our eyes to see what the idiot window-smasher was doing then. When she was done she grimaced heavily and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and I was a bit offended at the slur against my kissing skills, but I thought about the person she loves who’s gone and who she never talks about, and I wondered. We never kissed again – the next time we needed a distraction she staged a loud impromptu break up with me, in which I insisted on keeping the CD collection and she said she wanted the flowerbeds moved to her new house. The time after that I jumped onto a table and taught the party guests how to do the Macarena, which was a tune several hundred years and several million miles before their spatio-temporal coordinates, but I think they had fun anyway. The Doctor joined in and was grinning like a maniac the whole time.  
  
She has friends other than me, I think. Scattered in time and space in clumps and handfuls. I wonder if they miss her as much as she seems to miss them. I wonder if they took the fire with them, the same fire she’s giving me, that makes the whole universe brighter to be in.

She’s amazing. I want to be more like her, sometimes, and sometimes I just want to be around while she carries on being herself. It’s the most pathetic case of hero worship I’ve ever had, but I think she deserves it. After all she’s done.

She’s my Doctor, my moonface spacewoman. 

And she’s amazing!


End file.
